from the family-court dept

When we talk about young people filing lawsuits over "oversharing" of information and/or media on social media sites, schools are typically the targets of the suits. Inevitably, whether school personnel originally sought access to a student's social media accounts for good intentions or simply to be a slut-shaming dick, the contents within the accounts are then weaponized for humiliation purposes.

But a recent lawsuit filed by an eighteen year old woman in Austria must have parents the world over wincing. At issue wasn't some random person or school official attempting to shame the girl. It was just her parents' sharing photos of a family member and now they face a lawsuit.

A 18-year-old woman from Carinthia is suing her parents for posting photos of her on Facebook without her consent. She claims that since 2009 they have made her life a misery by constantly posting hundreds of photos of her, including embarrassing and intimate images from her childhood.

Legal expert Michael Rami was quoted by Austrian media as saying he believes she has a good chance of winning in court. The shared images include baby pictures of her having her nappy changed and later potty training pictures.

As a relatively new parent myself, I can assure you I'm paying attention. I haven't shared anything so intimate as potty-training photos of my two boys on social media, mind you, but who is to say what pictures my grown-up son might eventually come to feel is embarrassing? In the age of social media, I would think it's only pictures of our children that out-mass pictures of our food among those we share with our followers and friends. Well-meaning as we all might be, what happens if courts ill-prepared to tackle these kinds of disputes suddenly render this family sharing tortious?

To be fair to the young lady in question, it appears that her parents turned something of a deaf ear to her non-litigious complaints.

Despite her requests, they have refused to delete the photos - prompting her to sue them. "I'm tired of not being taken seriously by my parents", she said. Her father believes that since he took the photos he has the right to publish the images.

Because of our writing topics here at Techdirt, I'm basically thinking about intellectual property roughly all the time, but even I am having trouble imagining myself asserting this kind of defense as a father. I can imagine how frustrated the young lady must be at the callous attitude her parents have taken. But does it amount to something worthy of a lawsuit?

Well, Austrian law isn't as strict on matters of privacy and social media as other nations. As the article notes, the French government has gone so far as to warn parents against sharing photos of their children for fear of the social repercussions for them later in life. There's way too much hand-wringing in that kind of stance for my taste, but I can also see their point. I would hope, however, that the question comes down to delineating what qualifies as embarrassing content and what doesn't, rather than relying on any individual's interpretation. Otherwise, the courts could be a mess for a long time coming.

from the bad-news-for-oversharers dept

As Techdirt reported recently, the controversial "right to be forgotten" -- actually more of a right to be de-linked in search engines -- is starting to spread around the world. But its spiritual home is definitely in Europe, where privacy concerns tend to outweigh other considerations, like freedom of speech, that are regarded as paramount elsewhere -- in the US, for example. Leading the charge in the EU is France, which has been pushing Google to de-link items even more widely. According to a report in The Telegraph, France's zeal in protecting everyone's privacy may turn out to have some rather unexpected consequences:

Under France's stringent privacy laws, parents could face penalties as severe as a year in prison and a fine of €45,000 [about $49,000] if convicted of publicising intimate details of the private lives of others -- including their children -- without their consent.

As if that weren't enough, French parents may also find themselves being sued by their own offspring for posting all those cute pictures of them when they were babies:

Eric Delcroix, an expert on internet law and ethics, said: "In a few years, children could easily take their parents to court for publishing photos of them when they were younger."

Grown-ups who sue their parents for breaching their right to privacy as children could obtain substantial compensation awards, according to French legal experts.

Leaving aside the question of whether it's really appropriate for children to sue their own parents for this kind of thing, there is another important point here: the fact that people are posting intimate pictures of their family life online with no thought for the immediate or long-term consequences. There's little awareness that once something has been disseminated online it's very hard to remove it afterwards. The good news is that Facebook, at least, is aware of the problem, and working on a possible solution:

Jay Parikh, a vice-president of Facebook, said the service was considering setting up a system to notify parents who put photographs of children online without restricting their privacy settings.

Mr Parikh said: "If I was putting online a photo of my kids playing in the park, and I accidentally shared it with everyone, the system could say: "Hey, wait a minute, this is a picture of your children. Usually you only send them to members of your family. Are you sure you want to do this?' "

Even here, of course, there are issues to do with Facebook's use of facial recognition capabilities, which would presumably be needed in order to provide this new system. But a gentle reminder that posting pictures of your children for all the world to see might not be a really wise idea -- just before you publish -- seems like a reasonable approach. It's certainly better than fining you, suing you or throwing you in prison afterwards, when nothing can be done about it.

from the after-denying-it-all dept

There are lots of apps out there for parents spying on their kids computer/smartphone activities -- with the marketing pitch often being about how this will help "keep them safe" or some other such thing. mSpy is one of those companies, advertising right on the front page about how its snooping software can "keep children safe and employees efficient." It leaves out the bit about making both distrustful, but that's another debate for another day. Brian Krebs recently revealed that a "huge trove of data" had been leaked from mSpy and was being shared around the darkweb. And it exposed not just customer names but "countless emails, text messages, payment and location data" of those children and employees that the company was supposedly making "safe" and "efficient."

“There is no data of 400,000 of our customers on the web,” a spokeswoman for the company told the BBC. “We believe to have become a victim of a predatory attack, aimed to take advantage of our estimated commercial achievements.”

"Much to our regret, we must inform you that data leakage has actually taken place," spokeswoman Amelie Ross told BBC News.

"However, the scope and format of the aforesaid information is way too exaggerated."

She said that 80,000 customers had been affected. Initial reports suggested up to 400,000 customer details had been exposed.

"Naturally, we have communicated with our customers whose data could have been stolen, and described them a situation. We put in place all the necessary remedial measures and continue to work on mechanism of data encryption," she added.

We'll see. If history is any guide, the hack may be even worse. In almost every story of a big hack into corporate computer systems, the initial estimate on the number of accounts impacted is too low, and adjusted upward at a later date.

Either way, it appears that in the process of trying to make children "safe" -- the company may have ended up doing the exact opposite.

from the nanny-state dept

In case you thought the nanny-state arms race was over, it isn't and, also, who were you kidding? The initiation of laws and rules made by governments desperate to protect their own people from themselves is a pastime at this point, one which has previously seen legislative and law-enforcement actions taken against wearing headphones, smoking, and allowing children to find entertainment in the form of electronics. Now, in the UK, one school district is taking matters into its own hands, stating it will report to police parents who allow their children to play video games with an R18 rating.

This declaration was made in a letter warning parents of the new policy, authored by head teacher Mary Hennessy Jones, who heads up fifteen primary schools and one secondary school in Cheshire, England.

"Several children have reported playing or watching adults play games which are inappropriate for their age and they have described the levels of violence and sexual content they have witnessed: Call Of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Dogs Of War and other similar games are all inappropriate for children and they should not have access to them. If your child is allowed to have inappropriate access to any game or associated product that is designated 18-plus we are advised to contact the police and children’s social care as it is neglectful."

The letter sent home to some parents also mentions "inappropriate" social media accounts including Facebook and WhatsApp because it could "make them vulnerable to sexual grooming and explicit images."

If this isn't sending a shiver down the spine of any parents out there, it damn well should. The idea that a school district might seek to place itself directly in between a child and a parent when it comes to parenting decisions is somewhat without precedent when it comes to the type of entertainment the child engages in. This leaves aside the question of blatantly illegal content, of course, such as child pornography and/or real-life filmed violence. This is strictly about parents who decide (or choose not to decide) what types of legal entertainment their children are allowed to enjoy. As always, this overstep traverses a bridge built with platitudes about protecting children.

Threatening parents with calls to the authorities for a child even witnessing an adult playing an adult-rated video game is bad enough. Suggesting social media access could result in the same action (the letter does not explicitly say Facebook access will lead to a call to the police, but connects "social media sites" to "these games" in the bulleted list of "actions we are advised to take") pushes this whole thing into the realm of the completely ridiculous. While some parents may feel that it makes sense to restrict their kids' access to social media and violent video games, and there is arguably a place for schools to alert parents when the appropriateness of the entertainment content to which children are exposed inside and even outside of school is questionable, implementing a zero-tolerance policy on the choices of parents about their child's entertainment is the nanny state taken to an absurd level.

from the mama-government dept

The nanny-state arms race marches on, apparently. Whereas the previous intersection of overbearing government and technology has resulted in politicians attempting to ban the use of headphones while walking across the street, governments introducing all manner of silly policies in the name of "protecting the children", and even municipalities attempting to run psy-ops on citizens to keep them from smoking, Taiwan appears to be taking an even more direct approach with plans to fine the parents of children the government has deemed spend too much time with electronics.

Under rules passed last Friday by Taiwanese politicians, children under the age of two should be completely banned from using electronic devices, Xinhua, China's official news agency reported. Meanwhile under-18s should not be allowed to "constantly use electronic products for a period of time that is not reasonable". It means electronic products are now listed alongside cigarettes and alcohol as potentially dangerous vices.

And you can see their point, assuming you're a crazy person. Because electronics are tools primarily of communication and productivity, even if they're also used for entertainment, and government intrusion on young people's ability to communicate, learn, and be entertained is so far removed from alcohol and tobacco that one wonders how the argument was made with a straight face to begin with. The prospective "too much time" part of this legal equation has yet to be ironed out, but the brainchild for the law is, shall we say, more than slightly aggressive on the topic.

The new regulation is the brainchild of Lu Shiow-yen, a Taiwanese member of parliament who said his intention was to protect young people by stopping them using electronic devices for more than 30 minutes at a time. Parents who break the rules can be hit with fines of up to about £1,000 although it remains unclear how authorities will determine what amount of time is unreasonable.

There's a million reasons why this is stupid, but I'll boil it down to one specific reason: baseball. Baseball is huge in Taiwan. Baseball is enjoyed primarily on television and streaming electronic devices. And baseball, for all its wonderful aspects, takes roughly as much time as it takes for a mountain to form in the Nebraska prairie. Thirty-minute stretches of time as a limit effectively outlaws youngsters watching baseball. Put in that context, and really any other context, these sorts of artificial limitations on the electronics that dominate our lives (in a good way) are ludicrous.

Expect either the backlash here to be huge, or the law to go largely ignored. Either way, this is a political non-starter.

from the bad-ideas dept

A Georgia appeals court has said that parents of a 7th grader can be held liable for what their son posted on Facebook. At issue is a Facebook post where the son created a fake Facebook profile of a classmate of his, posting distorted images of her to make her look fat (ah, junior high schoolers...) and then including "profane and sexually explicit comments on the page depicting her as racist and promiscuous." Alerted to this, the kid's school suspended him, and his parents grounded him. However, the Facebook page stayed up for 11 months. The parents of the girl then sued the parents of the boy, claiming that they had "breached a duty to supervise their child's use of a computer and an Internet account" and, further, that they had "breached a duty to remove defamatory content existing on their property." The court rejected that second argument, but found the first argument at least reasonable enough to proceed to a jury.

Part of the issue is that, after finding out about the fake page, the boy's parents, beyond grounding him, didn't look into what the page was, and where it was. The court argues that this could be negligent, because having been informed of the problematic page their son created, they may have had a responsibility to then monitor that page.

In this case, it is undisputed that Dustin used a computer and access to an
Internet account improperly, in a way likely to cause harm, and with malicious intent.
The Ahearns contend that they had no reason to anticipate that Dustin would engage
in that conduct until after he had done so, when they received notice from the school
that he had been disciplined for creating the unauthorized Facebook profile. Based
on this, they contend that they cannot be held liable for negligently supervising
Dustin’s use of the computer and Internet account. The Ahearns’ argument does not
take into account that, as Dustin’s parents, they continued to be responsible for
supervising Dustin’s use of the computer and Internet after learning that he had
created the unauthorized Facebook profile. While it may be true that Alex was
harmed, and the tort of defamation had accrued, when even one person viewed the
false and offensive postings, it does not follow that the Athearns’ parental duty of
reasonable supervision ended with the first publication.

But that seems problematic on any number of levels. There is no indication that the boy continued to post to the page after being disciplined for it. So there wasn't any issue with the parents' ongoing supervision of his computer and internet usage. The idea that they could retroactively be held liable because once they found out about it they only punished him and didn't go further to find and delete the page he created seems awfully troubling. And that's before even getting to the issue of why the liability should be put on the parents anyway. There's this myth out there that parents should supervise any and all computer/internet usage. Not only is that impossible, it's also a bad idea. Yes, parents should help kids learn to use the internet, including some early supervision, but part of learning to do something is learning to do it on your own. That means teaching them about risks and how to deal with them, and encouraging them to ask questions or raise concerns if they find them -- but it shouldn't mean watching over their shoulder every moment online.

This kind of ruling doesn't necessarily mean that parents across Georgia need to immediately start spying on their kids' surfing activities, but it does suggest -- ridiculously -- that upon notification of a problem, they suddenly have a responsibility to monitor and clean up any messes their kids caused. That's very dangerous thinking.

However, there is another interesting angle, which lawyer Marc Randazza has suggested on his blog, that the parents should make use of CDA Section 230 to claim they're immune from liability. Remember, the whole point of CDA 230 is that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." And yet, this ruling effectively holds the parents responsible for the speech of their son. CDA 230 is mostly used to protect service providers from liability, but the law clearly also applies to "users." As Randazza notes:

It is without dispute that the content was provided by another person, namely the son. The son, therefore, is the liable party – not the parents – and under the CDA, any claim to the contrary appears to be barred.

He points to one case, in California that seems at least marginally analogous:

In Delfino v. Agilent Techns. Inc., 145 Cal. App. 4th 790, 806 (2006), the California court of appeals found that when an employee used the employer’s computer network to send threatening messages, the employer was not liable. In that case, the court held that although the defendant-employer merely acted as the provider of the computer system, the plaintiff’s tort claims in essence sought to hold the employer liable for the publication of the threatening messages. Id. Therefore, the employer was immune under § 230.

Randazza further notes, in a footnote, that the rulings in two of Prenda/AF Holdings failed lawsuits, claiming "negligence" for leaving WiFi opened, further reinforce the idea that Section 230 should apply in cases involving things like "negligence" for enabling the actions of others. It's too bad the lawyers for the parents either chose not to raise this argument, or perhaps didn't even realize it was open to them.

So if you're looking to buy a tool to transcribe voice recordings in any language, a foolproof method to tell if someone's touched your phone's SIM card, or a version of email encryption that isn't available on the open market, try the world's most technologically advanced spy agency.

It's called the Technology Transfer Program (TTP), under which the NSA declassifies some of its technologies that it developed for previous operations, patents them, and, if they're swayed by an American company's business plan and nondisclosure agreements, rents them out.

There's actually no "transfer" going on here. Nearly everything in the catalog [pdf link] (with the exception of a few, decidedly unimpressive physical items near the back) is a license, and quite possibly a non-exclusive license at that. (Companies can lock other companies out, but not the government itself, and the catalog notes that licensees will have to relinquish sole control "within a reasonable period of time.") Should the NSA decide it can trust a company with its leftover inventions, it will have an opportunity to utilize stuff most companies don't really need or technology that's hardly state-of-the-art at this point. While some of this could be a potential starting point for bigger and better stuff, most of the offerings are leaving security/cryptology experts underwhelmed.

[Bruce Schneier] was dismissive of the remarkability of the agency's cryptographical offerings. "It's not new, it's very old, a few decades," he said of one product, listed as a Cryptographic Efficient Elliptic Curve.

"It's a way to get your door locks a little bit better. Does that change the value of your house? Kind of, not really," he said. "These are all pieces of plumbing. Plumbing has value, but this is one of the problems of patent law. Patents really overstate the value of plumbing, of technology. It's a little value, sure, but it's never gonna make or break a business."

In some of the released tools, you can see the origins in bulk metadata/communications harvesting. One patented product automatically detects voices in audio recordings. Another deals with creating cryptographic key escrow accounts for "third parties" to access encrypted files. Various data visualization programs separate needles from haystacks, while multiple tools tackle the task of turning virtual reams of text into coherent summaries.

While the NSA is following the spirit of the statute ordering the redistribution of government knowledge, it's probably the agency least likely to declassify anything groundbreaking. The best stuff still remains locked up. One also has to question the timing of this catalog release -- it's offered this service for years, but this is the first time the NSA has ever made the document public. Is this just another stab at rehabilitating its reputation, albeit one approached at a very oblique angle? Someone inside the NSA seems to think so.

The Daily Dot relayed one NSA employee's claim to Schneier, that the TTP was a means of injecting federally-funded research back into the U.S. economy.

Well, only if you take the most generous view of the NSA's scattershot collection of fine licensables. Schneier doesn't take this view.

"Bullshit," he responded. “The NSA's not stimulating the economy. They just said that and it sounds good. They just made that up."

No, it very definitely isn't stimulating the economy, at least not anywhere outside the Beltway. The damage the public disclosures have had on the private tech sector very much outweighs the potential income created by the NSA's mandated return of publicly-funded research and development -- a "return" that isn't a gift but a perpetual license and one that's only available to the companies the NSA chooses to work with.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The US education system is constantly being compared to other school systems -- with the underlying theme that the US might copy some of the best practices and put them to use for our kids. Sure, it's good to take a look around and see if there's a better way to teach kids, but some practices might be difficult to adopt (eg. eliminating long summer vacations). Here are just a few links on what we might learn from foreign school systems.

from the this-won't-end-well dept

There's a spectrum of responses in how to deal with internet trolls. On one end, you can give them a nice little golf-clap while mostly ignoring their often-hilarious antics. Somewhere in the middle is when a news organization decides to track the troll down and harrass them in real life in one of those ironic little moments that makes life worth living. Finally, I think we can call sending a SWAT team to respond to an internet troll on the other far end of the spectrum.

So, with that established, I wonder where we'll put Al Trautwig, a sports analyst in New York for the MSG Network, who found himself the target of a troll after he Twitter-typo'd his new co-worker Marty Biron as "Boron."

@AlTrautwig Thought it was an autobiographical tweet and you meant Moron.

— THE Blocknesmonster (@Blocknesmonster) November 13, 2013

That's about what I'd expect from someone with the Twitter handle THE Blocknesmonster. It's neither creative, nor funny, nor particularly memorable or deserving of attention in any way. So you'd figure Trautwig would ignore this lame troll and move on, right? Nah, he called the guy's mom instead.

Al Trautwig apparently found the troll's phone number and called him. Except the troll doesn't live at that number anymore and hasn't for 20 years; he lives in Israel now. So when Al Trautwig creepily tracked down the number for a heckler who called him a moron on Twitter, and called to confront him about it, he spoke to the heckler's mom.

"I get a call from my mother that Al Trautwig just called the house to speak to me because I wrote something about him on twitter. My mother told him that I don't live there anymore (20 years plus) and can she have his number so I can call him back. He refused to give his number to her and said to her not to worry, that he will find me."

I'm a big fan of sports journalism and talk-radio, and every once in a while a friend or family member will ask me why I listen to a bunch of childish goons shouting things at one another while calling it entertainment. I typically argue that that's not all sports journalism is. Al Trautwig just made things much harder for me by acting as childish as the troll and giving him roughly infinitely more attention than he deserves. In fact, all it did was cause the troll to begin tweeting at Trautwig nonstop, all while getting attention fed to him in response to the story of a sports journalist stooping down to the level of a jerk.

Mission accomplished? Hardly. I imagine that Trautwig has a great many more mothers to call now that this story is circulating.

from the another-tragedy-and-another-misguided-crusade dept

Lakeland, Florida has yet to erect any cyberbullying laws in the wake of a 12-years-old student's suicide, setting it apart from many other locales which have reacted badly to tragedies by rushing out overly broad and under-thought legislation. Of course, this plus is somewhat mitigated by the fact that Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd has pretty much turned his office into a vigilante squad after declaring his "zero tolerance" (and made up just right now) policy against cyberbullying.

Judd arrested 14-year-old Guadalupe Shaw for a Facebook post in which she acknowledged bullying Rebecca Sedwick and noted she "didn't give a fuck" that the 12-year-old had killed herself. Judd charged Shaw with aggravated stalking. Not content with that, Judd tasked his investigators with finding something he could charge Shaw's parents with because he was unimpressed with Shaw's unrepentant attitude and her parents' failure to "smash" Shaw's computer into "thousands of pieces" after they found out about her activities.

An outspoken Florida sheriff who arrested a 14-year-old girl for cyber-bullying after a younger schoolmate killed herself has filed child abuse charges against her mother, over an unrelated incident.

Polk County sheriff Grady Judd said Vivien Lee Vosburg, 30, punched and shouted obscenities at several children in her care in a violent incident in June that was captured on video [which can be viewed here] and later posted to Facebook by one of the children.

Judd has held Shaw's mother, Vivian Lee Vosburg, on child abuse charges. Meanwhile, Shaw has been released pending a court appearance. Not exactly what Judd was looking for when he first stated his desire to charge Shaw's parents for contributing (I guess) to the bullying of Rebecca Sedwick, but it seems to fit the narrative he's portraying.

"This clearly indicates to us that this appears to be a normal way of life," said Judd, who has declared a "zero tolerance" approach to cyber-bullying in his county. "They're laughing and cussing and throwing the F-bomb around, then they're posting that conduct for all to see. It is clear not only has Vosburg demonstrated she cannot control the behaviour of children she has access to without using violence, but she is obviously not monitoring the social media sites of children she has access to either.

"I'm astounded by this conduct, I'm astounded that it was posted and then I'm even more astounded that it stayed there."

Of Guadalupe Shaw, Judd said: "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree."

Florida attorney Mark O'Mara is stepping onto center stage in the debate over how much parents should be held responsible for children’s cyberbullying. He plans to draft legislation to impose criminal liability on parents who show "willful blindness or gross negligence" to the kind of online torment allegedly inflicted on Rebecca Sedwick, for which two girls were recently arrested.

"If a child kills someone while operating a parent’s car, the parents can be held responsible. If a child kills someone while using a parent's gun, the parent can be held responsible. If a child breaks the law using a computer or cellphone provided by the parent, how is that different?" wrote Mr. O'Mara, who served as defense attorney for George Zimmerman in this year's Trayvon Martin murder trial, in his "O'Mara Law Blog" on Thursday.

O'Mara's terrible idea looks to do more damage than Sheriff Judd's new found interest in zero tolerance policing of cyberbullies. O'Mara's proposal aims to do what Nova Scotia's atrociously bad cyberbullying law does: hold parents responsible for their children's actions. While O'Mara may have point about legal adults having been historically held responsible for certain illegal acts utilizing property owned by parents, this is breaking new ground.

For one thing, while Nova Scotia's law has the (to date untested) potential to hold parents civilly liable for their children's online bullying actions, O'Mara's draft legislation would hold parents criminally liable, a much more negative potential outcome. The attorney believes the law is needed because (in his opinion) parents have become too lax in monitoring and controlling their children's online activities.

O'Mara acknowledged in his blog that "there are substantial obstacles in the way of passing such legislation," but he said, "If parents won't adopt that responsibility, we need to hold their feet to the fire and insist they share liability, especially when their children's actions have life or death consequences."

If O'Mara's legislation is combined with the worst aspects of Nova Scotia's law (purely subjective "standard" for what can be termed "bullying," the entire process is ex parte -- no input from the accused during any step of the process), Floridians are going to have a new nightmare on their hands. Laws like this chill speech by holding normally protected expression to broadly restrictive standards. But all of this is what's come to be expected when people with the power to push legislation and deploy investigators decide to turn a tragedy into a crusade.